Conspiracies: The Facts * the Theories * the Evidence (20 page)

The conspiracy view, unsurprisingly, has it that someone knew

very well that some kind of visual material was needed to further the Libyan agenda (widely considered to be yet another NWO

move, along with the Syrian and Iranian situations) and reached

for the most conveniently available candidate, guessing that most viewers wouldn’t notice the difference – as the majority didn’t. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had occurred: on the day of 9/11, a video purporting to show Palestinian Muslims celebrating

the fall of the twin towers was widely circulated on the American CNN network, seemingly to inflame the hatred already being

felt towards Islam (given that blame had been almost instantly

apportioned by the media before the dust had even settled). Yet

the scenes are claimed to have been recorded a few years earlier

and said to be entirely unrelated to the 11 September attacks.

The India/Libya broadcast may not have been the first major

public deception over Libya. The bomb which destroyed Pan-Am

Flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988, killing 270 people 118

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on the plane and in the town below, was broadly perceived to

have been ordered by Colonel Gaddafi’s regime at the time, and

a Libyan was eventual y convicted for the crime in 2001. Yet even mainstream publications such as the British satirical magazine

Private Eye
have loudly called Libya’s guilt into question, with much contrary evidence unaddressed by official inquiries. If

Flight 103 was not blown up by the Libyans, though, then who

was responsible? Natural y, all options from Palestinian militants, Mossad agents and elements from Iran or even South Africa have

been suggested, but other people believe that it was arranged as

just one more fold in the long, careful y staged road to the New

World Order.

The WikiLeaks ‘Revelations’

Returning to Iraq and propaganda issues, it was revelations

concerning the behaviour of Western troops there that first

drew public attention to the website known as WikiLeaks. More

recently the personal crises of its somewhat mercurial founder,

Julian Assange, and his battles against extradition to Sweden on

charges of sexual misconduct – which he claims are trumped-up

reprisals – have conveniently stolen much of the attention. This is unfortunate, as WikiLeaks was without question the first source to rightly call attention to misuses of military power in Iraq, before widening its remit to expose other atrocities.

WikiLeaks operates by providing an open database, free to

access, where anonymous whistleblowers and inside sources can

‘leak’ confidential documents on subjects they consider are of great concern to the public. Just one year from the website’s inception in 2006, it was said to have received over a million documents, and that number grew as the years passed and interest inevitably mounted.

When newspapers such as the
Guardian
and other global

media outlets entered into agreements with WikiLeaks in 2010

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to publicize some of the less sensitive, but still embarrassing

information, especial y in regard to US State Department diplomatic communications, the profile of the website and its incriminating

data went stratospheric. Authorities were aghast, and arguments

raged about the morality of the operation, with even members of the public concerned about the wider effects on national security and the potential y compromising position into which the information

might place some of the informants named in the documents. Many

of the more sensitive references
were
blanked out, but not al .

So was it all worth it? Were any major conspiracies revealed,

as some truthseekers had hoped, by the unprecedented deluge of

new, previously classified, information? Concern was certainly

raised by the planned assassinations of government ministers in

the ‘rogue states’, or by the detail of what real y went on at the Guantánamo Bay US prison compound and suchlike. However,

full outrage was reserved for the release of gunsight footage from a US Apache helicopter during an airstrike against a group of

Baghdadi insurgents in 2007. The indiscriminate strafing of both

armed and
un
armed civilians, with children nearby, shocked viewers, while the audio recorded a coldly efficient disregard for human life (‘light ’em all up’). Records of other dubious military ventures, particularly in Afghanistan, also disappointed observers who had until that moment clung onto a cosier il usion of ‘their

boys’ doing a tough but necessary job, whereas the truth revealed an unholy relish behind some of the killing. Few lessons, it seemed, had been learned from Vietnam, where the processing of men

into unfeeling machines caused untold psychological damage to a

whole generation of US soldiers.

Aside from the intent to cover up such unsavoury events,

however, these didn’t quite constitute evidence of a full-blown

conspiracy for the hardcore seekers. So what else was present in

the WikiLeaks material?

The diplomatic cables splashed across the world’s media in

2010, displaying the content of emails and supposedly confidential 120

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transcripts of conversations or meetings, were in many ways a

distraction from the more serious elements, and merely proved

what everyone knew at heart – that politicians and their aides were endemical y less than honest with their feelings about colleagues, or counterparts in other countries, and were as prone to sniping and gossip as most people. It wasn’t comfortable for some of the high-profile characters implicated, but it was survivable. Other WikiLeaks information, from everything on climate change propaganda and

banking irregularities to toxic waste dumping and membership of

far-right organizations, caused commotions of different kinds, but it seemed to be resolutely mainstream in its subject matter.

Was this real y all that WikiLeaks had to reveal, given the

prevalence of computer hacking and the seemingly unending

wel spring of documents it had access to? Where, asked the

truthseeker community, was the detail on, say, 9/11 and other

potential false-flag plots, or maybe UFOs and secret military

technology? WikiLeaks was soon perceived by some conspiracy

theorists as being just another component of distraction, taking

the heat off the real y big issues by focusing attention on the lesser ones that could be more easily absorbed and moved on from.

Was WikiLeaks, in fact, a complete set-up from the start, or had

it simply just not got near the important layers of
real y
hidden information and was itself being manipulated to issue stories

that couldn’t be official y sanctioned but which were nonetheless helpful to have out there? There is some justification for these

allegations, given some of the odd omissions which might at least have been referred to somewhere in the documents. But perhaps

this misses the point: what WikiLeaks
did
do was once and for all reveal the reality of civilization’s usual dealings to itself, this time in plain sight. Any remaining delusions that integrity and

goodwill fuelled military or political campaigns were pretty much shattered by the disclosures, for those still concentrating.

If there was any truth to the view that WikiLeaks had been

manipulated against its wil , by 2011 it had clearly served its

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purpose and was under heavy fire from the authorities. The arrest the year before of Bradley Manning, the US army soldier accused

of being responsible for some of the most damaging leaks with

regard to Iraq and Afghanistan, seemed to mark a watershed in the effectiveness of the website. Although it had thus far managed to evade international law through loopholes and legal forethought,

WikiLeaks’s happy continuation was also compromised by banks

and credit card companies which, under pressure from the USA,

now refused to deal with it. Meanwhile the pending charges

and personal attacks on Assange, with accusations of anti-

Semitism thrown in for good measure, weakened WikiLeaks’s

perceived imperviousness, and its moment in the sun seemed

to have passed. Assange fell out with some of the website’s fellow founders and went solo, his threats to reveal even more damning

evidence of political fallibility left dangling once he found refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy. Manning, meanwhile, was left to

face a US court martial on various counts of treason and kept

in solitary confinement, although his supporters fight on. The

lasting legacy of WikiLeaks, however, was its further negative

impact on the collective capacity to trust.

The MPs’ Expenses Scandal

Although not a conspiracy in the conventional sense, but

indisputably corruption, another major development which had

a detrimental effect on trust in authority exploded in 2009, when the press gained access to the extravagant expense claims of a large number of British MPs (Members of Parliament). The subsequent

fury across the country as revelations poured out over a period

of weeks demonstrated, curiously, that a parliamentary system

which allowed thousands of war victims to die in the face of a

probable deception could be forgiven, but one that fraudulently

took large amounts of public cash could not.

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Some of the expenses, claimed for the likes of porn videos and

duck houses, were laughable if reprehensible, but others were more serious, with ghost second homes and long-settled mortgages

falsely claimed for, pilfered from the national purse. Parliamentary corruption was nothing new, previous scandals having involved

financial incentives being given to MPs by lobbyists and other

privileges exchanged for confidential information, but the sheer

scale of the institutional criminality exposed by the expenses

scandal left many citizens reeling. It is hard to find a British citizen today who would say they trusted an MP implicitly.

Once again, as a result of this exposé, the more alternative-

minded of the new doubters found themselves being drawn

to other areas of speculation, for where there is corruption,

conspiracy is usual y not far behind. Britain’s ‘Climategate’ the same year, which exposed seemingly calculated withholdings

of important data from within the Climatic Research Group –

information which might challenge the dramatic and tax-aiding

global warming hypothesis – didn’t help. Suddenly, it was not such a leap to consider that MPs who would lie about something as basic as dinner expenses, or indiscriminately cover for disingenuous

scientists, would very probably deceive on larger scales too.

Sure enough, full-blown conspiracy theories soon began to

arise over the very timing of the expenses scandal, leading some

to consider that the whistle had been blown for more reasons than may have met the eye. Not least, the endless media obsession with ducks and mortgages managed to eclipse the far more crucial

issues around the European Parliamentary elections being held at

the height of the scandal, thus avoiding important debates over

the seemingly underhand extensions of the Treaty of Lisbon, for

instance, which ushered in a more strictly federal Europe without the need to vote for one. In the same breath it undermined belief in the British constitution itself, leading some to call for greater unity with the EU as a corrective measure to all the parochial

dishonesty (rather missing the point that corruption would seem

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to be as rife within the EU as anywhere else). The European

project is seen by many truthseekers as one of the paths to the

Orwellian super-states aspired to by the New World Order, with

the significant troubles of the euro currency considered not an

irregularity, but a factored-in component
designed
to crash at a chosen moment to make way for a more heavily regulated and

federal system.

On one level, disil usionments such as that caused by the

expenses scandal undoubtedly help people see the truth of how

things real y are: a healthy development if they encourage more

considered thinking on how to better the world. Less good is the

resulting cynicism that can also generate profound apathy, risking a stagnant slide towards a disempowered population reluctant to

stand up for itself – perhaps that is the very idea, according to some. After al , why bother even trying to deal with a state riddled with layers of such entrenched corruption so obviously stacked

against the individual? This dangerous mindset was further

fostered by the peeling away of even more layers in 2011.

Murdoch: Rule by Proxy

When it emerged in 2011 that illegal phone hacking of celebrities, politicians and other prominent figures had extensively taken place at the UK tabloid the
News of the World
, run by media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News International (News Corporation, global y),

there was a predictable reaction of public annoyance. When it